BIBLIOGRAPHY – Settlement Schools Southern Appalachians

Pine Mountain Settlement SchoolSeries 40: Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY – SETTLEMENT SCHOOLS SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS

A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY [in process]

Many of the resources in this bibliography of Settlement Schools in the Southern Appalachians are focused on the urban settlement movement. Familiarity with this movement is fundamental to an understanding of the rural settlement movement.

Most of the settlement houses in the urban movement were founded at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth-century. Nancy Wackstein credits their early work for the birth of social work. The earliest urban settlement houses were in England, with Toynbee Hall recognized as the first of its type founded in 1884. Toynbee Hall is still active today, while many of the houses it spawned in the United States have ceased their fundamental missions. Poverty is still studied, but the researchers rarely live among those it characterizes.

The rural settlement movement persisted longer than many of the urban settlements as living and working within the rural environment seems far less hostile than many of the locations in the inner city of the country’s largest cities.

When the English founder of the Settlement Movement, Stanton Coit, came to New York to assist in the establishment of the first Settlement House in 1886, he found conditions well documented in the photographs and writing of Jacob Riis. The New York settlement house, called first, the Neighborhood Guild and later the University Settlement was central to the idea of the Settlement Movement in the United States and Jane Addams carried the ideas into her Chicago Hull House and through her many contacts into the rural settlement movement in the southern Appalachians, particularly eastern Kentucky. [see Suzy E.E. Edelstein‘s comments for more information.]

Under the guidance of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs of Kentucky, the rural settlement movement took root in Eastern Kentucky. Katherine Pettit and May Stone two stalwart members of the Women’s Club in the Lexington area pitched their tents near Hazard, Kentucky and the following year began the process of founding a permanent school in the mountains founded on many of the principles of the urban settlement movement. In 1913 Pettit left this first school, Hindman Settlement, to found another school, the Pine Mountain Settlement School.

Lucy Furman, a writer and early worker at Hindman wrote about these early efforts first in an article for Century Magazine and later as a forward to her novel Sight to the Blind:

“…While its academic work is excellent, special stress is laid upon the industrial courses, the aim being to fit the children for successful lives in their own beloved mountains. To this end the boys are taught agriculture, carpentry, wood and metal work, and the rudiments of mechanics; the girls cooking, home-nursing, sewing, laundry work, and weaving, these subjects being learned not only in classes but by doing the actual labor of school and farm.

Aside from educational work proper, various forms of social service are carried on,–district nursing, classes in sanitation and hygiene, social clubs and entertainments for people of all ages, and a department of fireside industries, through which is created an outside market for the beautiful coverlets, blankets and homespun, woven by the mountain women, as well as for their attractive baskets.

When the children trained in our school go out to teach in the district schools, they take with them not only what they have learned in books, but our ideas as to practical living and social service also, each one becoming a center of influence in a new neighborhood.

A feature of the work that deserves special mention is the nursing and hospital department, the ministrations of our trained nurse. Miss Butler [Harriet Butler, later at PMSS], having done more, possibly, than any other one thing, not only to spread a knowledge of sanitation and preventive hygiene, but also to establish confidential and friendly relations with the people.”

… In that period the half-dozen clinics held in the school hospital by Dr. Stucky of Lexington, and his co-workers, have brought direct surgical and other relief to the afflicted of four counties. To be present at one of these clinics is to live Bible days over again, and to see “the lame walk, the deaf hear, the
blind receive their sight, and the poor have the good news preached
to them.”

And not only this,–these clinics have demonstrated that nearly one-half the people examined have trachoma or other serious eye diseases, and have been the means of awakening the Government to its responsibility in the matter, so that three government hospitals have already been started in the mountains for the treatment of trachoma.

So valuable, in many directions, has been the influence of the Settlement School, that tracts of land have been offered in a number of other mountain counties for similar schools; but so far only one, that at Pine Mountain in Harlan County, has been begun.

An intimate account of life within the Hindman School is given in a recently published book, “Mothering on Perilous,” in which are set forth the joys–and some of the shocks–experienced by the writer in mothering the dozen little mountaineers who, in the early days, shared with her the small boys’ cottage. The real name of the school creek is, of course, Troublesome, not Perilous. …”

Woods, Robert. A. and Kennedy, A. J. (1913) Young working girls; a summary of evidence from two thousand social workers, ed. for the National Federation of Settlements with an introduction by Jane Addams, Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company

Addams, Jane. The second twenty years at Hull-House, September 1909 to September 1929, with a record of a growing world consciousness. New York, NY: The Macmillan company, 1930

Addams, Jane. Philanthropy and social progress; seven essays, by Jane Addams [and others] delivered before the School of Applied Ethics at Plymouth, Mass., during the session of 1892. Freeport, NY: Books for Library Press 1969.

Pacey, Lorene M. Readings in the Development of Settlement Work. New York: New York Association Press, 1950.

Pagano, Mary Josephine, D.M.A. The history of the Third Street Music School Settlement, 1891-1984. Music school and social settlement: The dual identity of the original music school settlement. Manhattan School of Music, 1996.

Sheldon, Sayre P., ed. Her war story: twentieth-century women write about war.Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. See chapter: “From Peace and bread in time of war.” by Jane Adams.

Stebner, Eleanor J. The Women of Hull House: a study in spirituality, vocation, and friendship. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Stoddart, Jess. Challenge and Change in Appalachia: The Story of Hindman Settlement School. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002.

Barney, Sandra. Maternalism and the Promotion of Scientific Medicine During the Industrial Transformation of Appalachia, 1880-1930NWSA Journal – Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 1999, pp. 68-92. During the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries rural Appalachian life was fundamentally challenged by the intrusion of industrial capitalism. While historians have illustrated the complexities of these developments in the areas of labor and economic history, little has been done to document the importance of gender in the reconstruction of Appalachian customs and traditions. By focusing on the role of women volunteers and settlement workers in the promotion of scientific medicine, this article argues for a recognition of women as active agents who labored to impart the expectations and presumptions of an increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized medical system to rural people. Driven by maternalist concerns and professional and class ambitions, women activists were key players in encouraging rural Appalachian residents to redefine their fundamental understandings of health and of their relationship to their healers. In recent years scholars have produced an increasingly sophisticated historiography describing the actions of Appalachian women during the Progressive Era. Brought to public attention in the 1980s by the…

Boyd, Tom. “Progress Is Our Most Important Product: Decline in Citizen Participation and the Professionalization of Schooling in an Appalachian Rural County,” in Sam Gray (ed.), The Many Faces of Appalachia (Boone: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1985), 107-124

England, Rhonda George. Voices From the History of Teaching: Katherine Pettit, May Stone and Elizabeth Watts at Hindman Settlement School 1899-1956. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Kentucky, 1990. [Not a particularly well-argued scholarly work, in the view of some, but it contains substantial information from the correspondence and diary of Pettit and from Elizabeth Watts.]

Folmsbee, Stanley J. “The Early History of the University of Tennessee,” East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications, XLII (1970), 3-19

Forderhase, Nancy. “Settlement School Goes to the People: Pine Mountain School’s Community Centers at Big Laurel and Line Fork, 1919-1940,” in Jim Lloyd and Anne G. Campbell (eds.), The Impact of Institutions in Appalachia(Boone: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1986), 88-99

Forderhase, Nancy. “Perception of a Hinterland: Women’s Travel Journals, 1908-1916.” An analysis of the ambivalent reaction of middle-class. [SOURCE??]

Progressive Era women to the land and people of Appalachia.” Paper for the 1997 Appalachian Studies Association meeting at Pine Mountain State Park in Pineville KY. The program theme was “The Spectrum of American Studies.”

Forderhase, Nancy, “Limited Only by Earth and Sky”: The Louisville Woman’s Club and Progressive Reform,” Filson Club Quarterly, July 1985.

Glen, John M., “Like a Flower Slowly Blooming: Highlander and the Nurturing of an Appalachian Movement,” in Stephen L. Fisher (ed.), Fighting Back in Appalachia: Traditions of Resistance and Change(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 31-55.

Ogawa, Manako. ” ‘Hull-House’ in Downtown Tokyo: the Transplantation of a Settlement House from the United States into Japan and the North American Missionary Women, 1919–1945.” Journal of World History. Vol. 15, No. 3, (September 2004), pp. 359-387.

Schwarzweller, Harry K. and James S. Brown, “Education as a Cultural Bridge between Appalachian Kentucky and the Great Society,” in John D. Photiadis and Harry K. Schwarzweller (eds.), Change in Rural Appalachia: Implications for Action Programs(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 129-146

Talen, Emily. “School, Community, and Spatial Equity: An Empirical Investigation of Access to Elementary Schools in West Virginia,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, XCI (Sept. 2001), 465-486